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Monday, November 18, 2013

Right Wing Sabotage of ACA Includes DDoS Attacks

Via The Examiner:
The House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting... [a] successful attack that is designed to deny access to the [healthcare.gov] website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing the servers, saturating them with more traffic than the website is designed to handle. Right wingers have been distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week... "Destroy Obama Care!" ... is the advertised name given to the attack tool by "right wing patriots" who are distributing the DDoS tool through downloads on social networks, which promises to overwhelm the Healthcare.gov website... Some online news sites have talked about this attack tool being distributed by right wingers, and Congress held hearings this week and talked about the attacks, but there is not one mainstream news organization that seems to be interested.
These attacks are of a piece with misinformation campaigns about "death panels" and "government takeovers" and the recent spate of deceptive cancellation notices sent by insurance profiteers to divert junk insurance policyholders into ruinously expensive coverage without notifying them about incomparably better options made available by the ACA, all the while blaming the ACA, of course, as well as with refusals of Republican governors and state legislatures to accept Medicaid expansion to support millions of their own most vulnerable citizens, refusals to create their own exchanges thus overloading the federal exchanges and website, endless delaying tactics to ensure coders had little advance time to address real demands the website would face, and efforts to actively interfere with Navigators who would help citizens access urgently needed and now available services and subsidies. While the mass-mediated narrative rails monotonously about "the disastrous rollout," indifferent to actual causes or real improvements, it is sometimes said that Republicans are "rooting for failure" of the Affordable Care Act. This is true but utterly inadequate: Republicans are actively working for failure, actively attacking the law of the land, indulging in nullification of laws legitimately passed, endorsed by the Supreme Court, and mandated by the verdict of two national elections.

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